Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Serendipity and that

These days Joyce Fetteroll has a small group of witnesses and perhaps assistants, for a book she and Danny are working on. She's bringing (alphabetically) a word and we make up definitions, and when she tells us the real one, we use it in a sentence. There's art involved, and humor, too.

Today she had defined "latrinalia"

I wrote:

Just the other day Holly quoted me the traditional "If you sprinkle while you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie."

I asked if she knew of the equivalent one for men's rooms. She did not.

We aim to please.
You aim too, please.

At a roadside candle outlet in North Carolina or Virginia, on a road trip with a friend of mine many years ago, I chose one of several toilet stalls. While sitting, I read "I love Keith Dodd" in someone else's handwriting. Someone else's Keith Dodd, no doubt. Quite a great coincidence.

Including Joyce's deposit of a word meaning bathroom writings just a few days after Holly and I talked about that a bit, I've had three of them this week.

Because I bought some things from China and Holly was here when they arrived, I told her about the government-subsidized postage and China's 20 years or so of moving toward capitalism. She and Keith brought a bottle of mead they bought because a friend's brother owns the company. It was good. I couldn't remember his name and when I did, I googled and found his dad, who was an atomic researcher and I didn't know so much cool stuff about him. In an interview about early atomic research in Los Alamos, he was asked about a co-worker who had moved to China. He said she was disappointed about China's eventual movement away from communism and toward capitalism.

Yesterday at lunch, Keith was asking what I knew about labyrinths in churches. I did know some, and a friend of ours designed and oversaw installation of an outdoors one at a church not far from us. Later that day I turned on the Sherlock Holmes audible book I'm listening to, and the word labyrinth popped up.

There's a word for that—words or factoids popping up—but I don't remember it. It's one of the many magically fun things in life.

And I posted that somewhere and someone gave me the word, and then...
I can't remember where it was provided, or who.